One tiny favor for 2014! If you’re enjoying the podcast, could you please take 30 seconds now to leave a brief review on iTunes? Just click “View in iTunes” under my pic here. If I pass 2,000 reviews before Jan 1 (a goal of mine for 2014!), I will reciprocate by writing a massive, behind-the-scenes post […]

James Altucher has a great summary of his many interviews with successful people (including me). Do successful people talk about their personal goals? Not so much. That has been my observation as well. Great read.

Modiano’s oeuvre – upward of twenty novels, plus poetry, plays and children’s fiction – acts as commentary and analysis of the French post-war experience. Interviewed about his Nobel win, he says: ‘I have the impression of writing the same book for forty-five years’. That book could be said to be a study of the disruption of the Nazi Occupation and its effects on identity in France, and an investigation into – as the Nobel Committee hints – the construction of memory and, indeed, of fiction itself.West Camel on Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano.

Looking back on the theme landscape of 2014, a clear design trend emerged that highlights WordPress’ roots as a blogging platform. Minimalist, content-centric themes took center stage in the official WordPress Themes Directory, outpacing their more visually-bloated commercial counterparts.

This past year saw a major renaissance in themes for the personal blogger, particularly designs that showcase large, featured images. Many theme designers opted to hide navigation menus and sidebars behind a slideout menu, which also works well for mobile displays.

WordPress’ newest default theme, Twenty Fifteen, is the culmination of this trend towards simplicity. The vast majority of our top picks from 2014 were designed for personal blogs. For years, technology experts have been eager to declare that the blog medium is dead, but the steady growth of economic activity surrounding themes continues to grow in tandem with WordPress’ marketshare.

The spirit of independent publishing is growing stronger, and free WordPress themes are a crucial entry point for writers, photographers, and other creatives who are new to self-publishing. All of the outstanding selections featured here are available in the official WordPress Themes Directory.

Our list of the 20 best restaurant openings of 2014 is not restricted to places that only the one percent can afford. There’s only one restaurant on the list that we classify as luxury (£121 and above for two with wine and service). And since that’s the Chiltern Firehouse, where you can’t get a table unless you’re a Hollywood AAA-lister (or head of state, at the very minimum), the cost is irrelevant.

If you’re spending Christmas in London this year, you’re in for a treat! Take a Christmas Day bike ride through the beautifully quiet streets, a walking tour of the London Samuel Pepys would have known, or cheer on the Serpentine Swimming Club as they race through icy waters. Here are all the things you need to know for the best festive Xmas week in the capital. Merry Christmas everyone!

Each week, we round up the most exciting film events happening in London over the coming week, from pop-ups and one-offs to regular film clubs, outdoor screenings and festivals. Here’s this week’s top five…

Let’s admit: designers’ minds work in mysterious ways. As fluid as the design process claims to be, it’s most often a product of mismatched thoughts, tangential scribbles, and, in my case, Post-it Notes. However, the job of organizing those thoughts—whether for a client brief or personal sanity—causes a headache that most of us would rather avoid.

Post-it Plus, a new app from Post-it Brand, is designed to digitally catalog the brainstorming process. After covering a surface with Post-it Notes full of ideas, users snap a photo of the mess and the app visually recognizes each note. A green check mark means the Post-it Note has been recognized and captured; those not recognized can be enlarged for greater visibility.

While optical recognition is nothing new (a 3M-supported Evernote app released last year has similar recognition technology), the Post-it Plus App has organizational abilities to distinguish it as a useful tool for design teams. Captured Post-it Notes snap onto project- or topic-specific virtual whiteboards, and different users can combine their boards, allowing for team collaboration. Finished boards can be shared via text, email, and social media, or exported to PDF, Powerpoint, and Excel.

By applying grid-based whiteboards and document export capabilities, Post-it Plus accomplishes what many designers have struggled to do: make the ideation process look professional. In a field where some of the best work starts on coffee napkins or paper stuck to a wall, Post-it Plus provides a polished format to support a design decision, particularly to clients who are unfamiliar with brainstorming’s background mess. That clarity in presentation can make or break the brief—especially if your brief, like most of mine, began as a piecemeal of scrawls, asides and coffee.

Post-it Plus is a free universal iOS app. Download it here, and then get back to scribbling.

WordPress 4.1, “Dinah”, has just been released. WordPress 4.1 is the result of months of work and includes a number of excellent new features.

WordPress 4.1 was led by John Blackbourn, who did an outstanding job. Two hundred and eighty three contributors were part of WordPress 4.1, which Matt Mullenweg states is a new high.

Here are some of the new features.

Persistent Distraction-free Writing

I must begin with the new persistent Distraction-free Writing feature, as I’m using it to write this very post. We’ve had Distraction-free Writing since 2011, with the release of WordPress 3.2. However, it’s always been a single-experience decision. You hit the button to enter distraction free mode, and you utilize it for a single writing session.

Now, the button itself is persistent, and the experience of writing distraction free doesn’t enter a new screen, but rather fade away the distractions of the default editor.

The left admin seamlessly floats away, as do the metaboxes to the right of and below the editor. The editor itself remains, versus using a modified editor like before.

When you update to WordPress 4.1, you are triggered with a note about Distraction-free Writing, and now that it’s a decision you only have to make once, I think this feature will finally get the broad use it deserves. It really is much more pleasant to write without everything else around you, to be lost in your thoughts as they make their way to the editor.

Twenty Fifteen theme

The Twenty Fifteen theme is the finest work I’ve seen yet of the default theme team. A blogging, and personal, theme — Twenty Fifteen is simple, with beautiful typography, and capable of showcasing blog posts of any format with poise.

Twenty Fifteen comes in six base color schemes: default (light), dark, yellow, ping, purple, and blue. It also supports WordPress’ background and header image features, and allows you to customize colors from your base selection; Twenty Fifteen can be as quirky as you are.

Dozens of languages, available any time

WordPress has made tremendous progress for non-English speaking users in the past few releases. With WordPress 4.0, you could choose a language on installation, whereas before it required many more steps. Now the team has gone a step further, so that language can be changed at any time, right from WordPress’ general settings page.

Given that a third of WordPress installs are non-English (and if I recall correctly half of new downloads are non-English now), this change further reduces the barrier of language in publishing software, and is an excellent move for the progression of the platform across the world.

Recommended plugins

I believe recommended plugins is probably the most controversial feature in WordPress 4.1, though it is not without precedent. “Featured” themes have been in the WordPress dashboard for a while now. But with a tab for recommended plugins, now users can see plugin recommendations based on plugins already installed and plugins other sites have installed.

Recommended plugins are replacing the former popular plugins tab, and is mostly a change in the underlying API for showing the plugins themselves. Since it’s not a manual recommendation, I think this is a good change, and will more accurately help folks find relevant plugins than just listing the most popular plugins in the directory.

New template tags and theming tools

I’m really looking forward to using some of the new template tags introduced in WordPress 4.1.

My favorite is get_the_archive_title(). Themers out there all know about the big blob of conditionals in most theme archive templates to spit out the right string based on which archive template it is. Now, there’s a function for that, and it’s fully filterable to boot.

Descriptions of the new title functions, some new pagination functions, and some particularly nice body class assignment enhancements are well described on this Make WordPress post by Konstantin Obenland. There’s also a post about adding theme support to let WordPress handle title tags, which is a handy thing.

Log out from anywhere

A relatively small but nice security feature is the new ability to log out of all installs from a single location. WordPress uses cookies to keep you logged into your install for a period of time. Well, if you ever leave yourself logged in on a computer you don’t trust, you can now log out of all instances easily, from your profile page on an install.

There is a new button that says “Log Out of All Other Sessions,” and also tells you if you are logged in at more than one location.

More improvements to queries

I love how much progress has been made on the WordPress query tools in the last couple of years. WordPress 4.1 introduces the ability for a nested query syntax, which makes more complex queries possible for WP_Tax_Query, WP_Date_Query, and WP_Meta_Query. I don’t often call out single individual’s work on something, but Boone Georges reallyslayedit with the nested queries work. He wrote about it on his blog in detail.

Nulis is one of the most unique designs to land in the WordPress Themes Directory this year. At first glance, you might think the theme is rather plain. The screenshot on the theme’s description page doesn’t indicate anything interesting going on under the hood, but something about it intrigued me enough to put it up on a test site.

Nulis includes several options built into the native customizer for adding your own header image, background, a custom logo, the ability to change the header text color, and more. Once customized, the theme looks quite a bit less plain than its screenshot.

The icon on the top right spins when clicked and fades in a search bar. The icon at the top left of the theme also spins and opens a hidden panel with your logo, bio, navigation menu, social links, and any custom widgets you wish to add. Everything included in the hidden panel can be added via the customizer.

Nulis is the Javanese word for ‘writing,’ and the theme does an excellent job of highlighting your content, especially if you are fond of post formats. Each post format has its own unique styling to set it apart from the others. The one-column theme surrounds your content with ample white space and showcases large, full-width featured images. The theme is also responsive and looks fantastic on mobile devices.

Check out the live demo to see the theme in action, and make sure to try the interactive icons at the top while you’re there. It’s a fun addition for toggling the hidden panel and search box.

Nulis was created by web developer Denny Kuswantoro. It’s his first submission to the themes directory and his account will be one to watch in the future. You can download Nulis from WordPress.org or install it on your site via the admin themes browser.

Last month London-based chef Skye Gyngell opened her highly anticipated restaurant Spring to instant acclaim (we dropped in a couple of weeks ago for lunch and were smitten by the food and the decor).

So what does the former head chef of Petersham Nurseries (where she earned a Michelin star) and previous food editor at Vogue UK do when the day is done? She heads home and cooks some more. "When it’s freezing outside, cooking warming soups and stews gives me a reason to look forward to coming home," Gyngell says. "I like to relax in my kitchen, cooking and spending time with my two daughters." Join us for a tour of her kitchen and find out what she’s cooking for Christmas.

Photography by Alexis Hamilton for British Standard, unless otherwise noted.

Above: Gyngell opted for a two-tone kitchen: Everything under the counter is dark, and everything above the counter is white. Her battered wood floors suggest a "working" kitchen and are in keeping with the spirit of cabinets from British Standard, Plain English’s more affordable offshoot.

Above: The kitchen is on the ground floor of a west London terraced house and looks out onto the street. The tall cabinets on the left provide ample storage without looking too "kitchen-y."

Above: A white Carrara marble backsplash running the entire length of the wall is matched by the same material on the countertop. The traditional cabinets, painted Hague Blue from Farrow & Ball, contrast with the clean details of the stainless steel Mercury 1000 Range Cooker and Hood. An open shelf continues the datum set by the height of the hood.

Above: The chef’s vintage cookbooks are easily accessible via open shelving on one side of the island. A painting propped on the counter is a warm addition to the Carrara marble backsplash. (Want to try this in your kitchen? See The New Art Gallery: Paintings in the Kitchen.)

Above: A wall-mounted white BL6 Light from Bestlite provides task lighting along the clutter-free worktop. "I don’t have a food processor. I do everything in a pestle and mortar. I love hands, the connection with food," she told the London Times recently. Her arsenal includes "good knives from the Japanese Knife Company and Bourgeat pans."

Above: At the end of the kitchen, casual bench seating echoes the shape of the bay window.

Above: The leather cabinet pulls are from Plain English, British Standard’s parent company.

Above: What’s the chef cooking for Christmas? "On Christmas Eve, I’ll cook with friends—something traditional like a big glazed ham," Gyngell says. "Everyone always makes a big fuss about desserts at this time of year, but I like to finish meals with just a few lovely fresh clementines." Photograph by Amber Rowlands.

Walter Martin (of Walkmen fame) debuted his latest album, We’re All Young Together, earlier this year to much critical acclaim. Now, just in time for the holidays, Martin releases “I Walk So Slow (Under The Mistletoe),” a laid-back track recorded with singer/songwriter Kat Edmonson. The song has excellent use of marimba and helps usher in the holiday […]

"It’s rather difficult, when one has MANY friends, to show loyalty to them all at the same time…"

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Alleged Meeting Between 9/11 Hijacker and Iraqi Official Was Debunked by U.S. Intelligence Agencies Before It Was Trumpeted As War Justification … U.S. Pressured Czech Government to Lie There is extensive evidence that the U.S. government intentionally lied us into the Iraq war. Here’s a quick refresher: Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the…Read More

Our chief film critic rounds up his picks of the year, which include Boyhood, Under the Skin and 12 Years a Slave

Once again, awards season is upon us, and it’s time for those film awards which are really without without career prestige or any other benefit for the winners — who are in any case wholly unaware of their existence. By this I mean my own personal awards, the Braddies, covering films released in the UK this calendar year. As ever, I am offering a shortlist of ten in each category, and readers can of course comment below the line on which they feel would be the worthy winners, or what they feel are incorrect omissions or inclusions…

How a kind old man who spent his life in poverty, worked as a toll collector, and was entirely self-taught became one of the world’s greatest artists.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I’m doing something right.